Load nor Hormones are the biggest dictator of hypertrophy

So I was off in Toronto for the CanFit conference and came back with some amazing research that was presented. This comes from a talk given by Dr. Len Kravitz. I very much encourage you to check him out and do some more reading on him, very knowledgeable guy!

What this study showed was something amazing and will definitely lead to more research. It would appear that in trained individuals the real dictator of progress is dependent on if you go to failure, and not how much weight you lift or your hormone levels…

Now I do not want this to be read wrong. This does not mean you should butcher your last few reps of a set to really beat yourself up. This is never at the sacrifice of form. However in a trained athlete I would assume the athlete knows this. Seeing as everyone reading is probably not athletes already, I want to keep people safe here.

What this does mean is that if you stick to form and stay in a controlled environment the most important way to push along hypertrophy, and to a lesser degree, strength, is to GO TO FAILURE! Doesn’t seem to matter if it’s 50lbs for 50 reps, or 30lbs for 100 reps, you don’t even need to account for work volume! You just need to push the very last rep out of yourself every time you can.